Comet
by TCLessley
Summary: Companion piece to “Cupid”. Wherein Sakura lost an eye and gained.. a really obnoxious lover.


A/N: Not mine. :)

There is no smut here. Only bad language.

***

"This is all your fault." Sakura cast a withering glare toward her idiot lover.

"Perhaps," was his ever laconic reply.

"Perhaps my firm, round ass. This," she waved expansively at the very public, very disgusting Jonin HQ's communal bathroom with one rubber-gloved hand, "is all your fault."

"Mm," was Kakashi's only response as he gazed mock-adoringly at her aforementioned body part, not paying the room or the cleaning supplies piled at his feet the least bit of heed.

Sakura, seeing what he was about, muttered, "God, I hate you."

Giving her bum a loving pat before donning his own set of bright yellow gloves, he offered a cheery, "False." And then turned his attention to picking through the solvents and astringents and whatever the hell else had been stuffed into the buckets by the gleeful jonins manning the front desk. Not that it was difficult to see why the bastards were so excited. One, the great and powerful Copy-nin was being made to scrub toilets along with his pink-haired bitch of a girlfriend. Two, it looked like the place hadn't been cleaned in the last decade or so. Fantastic.

"Ugh," Sakura groaned as she set to work scrubbing the nearest sink basin. With her very own toothbrush. Hokage's orders.

She glanced over at Kakashi as he pulled a brush from one of his many pockets. A brush with suspiciously straight, new bristles. A brush that didn't look anything like the one sitting in their cup at home.

"You jackass, you bought a new brush. Tsunade specifically told us to use our own brushes. She said she was going to check," she seethed.

"And you actually listened to that?" he scoffed lightly, rubbing his thumb over the bristles of the generic blue brush. "Besides, I'm not actually cheating. This is my back-up brush."

"Back-up brush…?"

"For those many occasions when my usual toothbrush is inaccessible to me."

"Such as?"

"Well, like when I've misplaced my mission pack or when I've eaten curry. Delicious stuff, but those spices play havoc with my delicate sense of smell." He tapped the tip of his nose for emphasis. "Oh, but mostly when I'm seduced by strange women. It's nice to have an extra toothbrush on hand." He smiled benignly at her, which for Kakashi meant a subtle tilt of his chin and a half-squinted eye.

So Sakura followed suit with a sunny smile of her own as she merrily quipped, "You're never getting sex again."

"Also false," her lover replied disinterestedly, his focus having shifted to the nearest shower stall and the mysterious life-forms growing between the tile cracks.

"Yeah.." she admitted with a shrug, going back to scrubbing sinks, "that would probably be more aggravating for me than for you, anyway." A few moments passed before she thought to add, "Now that I think about it, I really should apologize to your hand for coming between the two of you."

Without missing a beat or interrupting his disinfecting of the mildewy shower, the Copy-nin drolly remarked, "That's alright. You coming on my hand more than makes up for it, I'm sure."

Sakura closed her eye and steadied herself with one hand on either side of the nearest basin. Taking a deep, calming breath, she asked, "Please, remind me why I don't smother you in your sleep?"

"You find my eccentric behavior and rakish charm strangely alluring as well as oddly compelling. Also, I'm damn sexy."

"..Maybe," she was forced to admit.

"Plus, you know you'd never be able to pull it off."

"Drop dead."

"If I do, it won't be because of anything you did, my sweet."

Sakura scrunched up her face and made a small sound of annoyed frustration before relaxing her shoulders and getting back to work. It wasn't too long, however, before she found herself sniffing the air curiously as she caught a strange scent above the smell of the cleaning products.

"Kakashi.. what's that smell?" she asked suspiciously.

"Not sure…" he replied in a slightly uncertain voice.

She quickly turned around to find him standing over a bucket that was happily spewing a noxious, green-tinged gas into the bathroom's once perfectly breathe-able, if rather foul smelling, air.

"What did you do?!" she shrieked.

"Mixed everything together," he answered guiltily, "I figured we'd get done a lot quicker that way."

"You can't mix cleaning supplies together, you moron! You're going to get us killed!"

He looked at her oddly for a moment and then tapped his face. "..Mask," he supplied, as if that would save him from the deadly fumes.

She rolled her eye, and grabbed his hand, "So you'll live about ten seconds longer than I will. Let's get the hell out of here."

"Okay," he agreed amiably.

Sakura took a step towards the door. Truthfully, she was starting to feel a little dizzy. Briefly, she wondered how long the bucket had been releasing its deadly contents before she'd noticed it. But only briefly because her next thought was something like, 'Oh look, there's the floor. Too bad I didn't get a chance to clean it before my face was personally introduced to it.' And then she didn't think much of anything at all.

***

"Nn.." Sakura groaned, trying to roll over in bed, and found that she couldn't. Sluggishly, she blinked her eye, the pin-pricks of the ceiling panels finally coming into focus. Hell, she was in the hospital. Again.

Something was tickling just under her nose, and she tried to brush it away, but couldn't seem to find the strength to even raise her little finger let alone her entire hand. Her head felt like it weighed a ton, and her tongue was thick and heavy and clung stubbornly to the roof of her mouth when she tried to speak.

Well, there was nothing to do but wait until someone realized she was awake. She sighed deeply, which turned out to be a mistake, because though her throat didn't want to cooperate when it came to producing intelligible speech, it seemed more than willing to cough like crazy. Fuck and double-fuck.

At least her coughing alerted an orderly that she was awake – and in distress. An oxygen mask was placed over her nose and mouth while a medic-nin was summoned to apply some chakra to ease her bronchial spasms.

Once she found that she could breathe normally again, the orderly that had come to her aid helped her to sit up and sip from a cup of water. The thing tickling her nose turned out to be an oxygen tube, and the medic explained that it would be removed after several courses of chakra therapy were applied to her lungs. This, of course, would occur over the next three days. _Three_ days.

She tersely thanked the medic and gave the orderly a slightly more friendly smile before asking if she could be left alone. The pair seemed more than willing to leave the room, and she soon found out why.

"Good morning," a scratchy voice offered from the bed opposite hers.

"Go to hell," she rasped back.

"Aw, Sakura, you're not being very grateful. I did save your life after all."

"Yes, after you nearly killed me in the first place, you.. you.." There just was no adequate way to describe what a complete and total asshole he was, so she gave up with a defeated little huff.

After some time she shifted to face him with some difficulty and spoke, "You know, there is really no way you didn't know what mixing ammonia and bleach would do."

He nodded in the affirmative.

"So…?"

"Well, look at it this way, Tsunade will never ask us to clean anything ever again."

After a moment's reflection she responded with a, "True." And then added an, "You really are an evil bastard," for good measure.

"Yes, but I'm your evil bastard."

"..Also true." She gave him a rueful half-smile, "May the gods have mercy on me."

***

The End.

Additional A/N: The reason for their punishment had to do with a visiting dignitary, a casual grope of someone's behind, and a subsequent broken nose. :)


End file.
